For eager teachers seized my youth, pruned my faith and trimmed my fire. Showed me the high, white star of truth, there bade me gaze and there aspire.
He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the “Iliad” itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.
But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.
Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.
Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?
Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
Dreams dawn and fly: friends smile and die, Like spring flowers. Our vaunted life is one long funeral. Men dig graves, with bitter tears, For their dead hopes; and all, Mazed with doubts, and sick with fears, Count the hours.
Sanity – that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.